Relax and Have Fun

I picked up a copy of Walter A. McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 in 2007 at a used book store in DC’s Eastern Market.  I read it this week because I wanted a quick review of the different ways that the US has dealt with the rest of the world before I moved on to the next book on Israeli history.  McDougall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, divides US foreign policy into eight phases:

Our Old Testament:  1. Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)  2. Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)  3. The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)  4. Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called).

Our New Testament:  5. Progressive Imperialism  6. Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)  7. Containment  8. Global Meliorism.

The biblical conceit is used to emphasize that the latter four phases are dependent upon reverence to the first four phases.  The book is short at just two hundred and twenty-two pages, and McDougall uses them efficiently to define our historical responses to the world from 1776 through the late 1990′s.  In describing his phases, he criticizes many other historians’ definitions of our foreign policy and backs up (most of) his arguments with logic, historical examples and/or redefinitions in light of his schema.   Not having read the majority of these other historians, I cannot judge the validity of all of his arguments.   Here is a longer review, a review from the New York Times, a review from Foreign Affairs, and a more up-to-date critical review.

In spite of the book’s brevity and some of the reviewers’ criticisms, I recommend it as a very accessible (and vocabulary-building) way to start to come up to speed on the history of US foreign policy.  At a minimum, it gives the reader a quick review of our history and of our responses to history, and at a maximum it provides an interesting framework to use when trying to understand or predict current foreign policy decisions.

I learned about Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers by Richard E. Newstadt and Ernst R. May from AFSA’s recommended reading list when I started our book club last summer.  I assume the text is still used in many college courses, because there are multiple copies available in several local used book stores.   We haven’t discussed the book in our book club yet, but I was curious about why the title was highly recommended.   Reading Thinking in Time is like attending a series of lectures by the authors (both professors), but lectures where you cannot interrupt and ask clarifying questions.

The authors posit that government decision-makers (and their staffers) would make at least marginally better decisions if they applied the mini-methods (authors’ term) described in the text.  The mini-methods are designed to give the decision-makers more historical perspective of the concern, the players (including organizations) and the possible solutions.  The authors do a very good job of teaching the mini-methods throughout the course of the book by re-enforcing the learning from chapter to chapter.

Drawing on examples of domestic and foreign policy decisions mainly during the Johnson, Nixon and Carter administrations, the authors describe the history behind the decisions, the facts apparently associated with the decisions, the success or lack thereof of the actions taken, and then describe a mini-method that could have been applied (or that was successfully applied unconsciously).  Their main mini-methods include defining the immediate situation by documenting what is Known (now), Unclear and Presumed; clarifying the usefulness of analogies by documenting likenesses and differences in the current situation; asking “What’s the story?”; and defining the placement of the people and organizations involved in terms of their histories and experiences.  The authors are very explicit about the degree to which these steps (and the ones I have omitted above) may help the decision-makers and may not.

The whole time I was reading this book, I kept thinking about a book by a former CIA analyst called The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving.   The content of both books (regardless of both the differences between intended audiences and the differences amongst the authors’ backgrounds) seems to be a slightly-advanced version of common sense when you are reading it, but the tools are really things that most of us forget to do when we’re actually making decisions.  And when we forget to apply the tools, we greatly increase the risk of making bad decisions.  Which takes me to my favorite quote from the book:  Good judgement is usually the result of experience.  And experience is frequently the result of bad judgement. -Robert A. Lovett.